New Year’s at The New Yorker

The New Yorker has been around for eighty-nine years, and, over that time, it’s published a lot of fun stories about New Year’s. Here are two of my favorites, both from Talk of the Town sections published at the beginning of their respective years.

This, from January 10, 1959, is a little anecdote about New Year’s Eve parties and how frustratingly loud they can be:

A lady we know has related to us a gaffe that she made at one party, and we consider it typical of what happens when too many people gather in one place merely to drink and chatter. … As the hubbub was reaching its height, she was introduced to a pleasant-faced young man, whose name she understood to be Cudahy. Politely, she asked him the nature of his employment, steeling herself to hear something not necessarily to her advantage about the ins and outs of meat packing. To her surprise, the young man replied that he was in the jewelry business. Our friend said she’d heard that jewelry was a very competitive affair, and the young man said that this might often be the case. She then urged him, in effect, not to be disheartened by the apparent odds against him; sooner or later, fortune would smile on his endeavors. As she was getting off this little homily, she noted a look of increasing bafflement on the young man’s face. Something had evidently gone wrong, and, suddenly panicking, she melted away into the crowd, located her hostess, and asked who in heaven’s name it was that she had been talking to. Whereupon it turned out that the young man’s name wasn’t Cudahy at all; it was Cartier.

And here’s a complementary story, from January 18, 1988. It’s by Richard Preston, and it’s about heading out to Staten Island to listen to New Year’s from a quiet place—in this case, the end of an abandoned pier. (Preston was following up on a story his father would tell; he maintained that, on New Year’s Eve, from Staten Island, you could hear “a rising sound, resembling distant surf, or a wind moving across the water, blended with screaming and a sound of horns, going on and on, for five minutes or longer, and gradually dying away. That was Manhattan.”)

Two minutes before midnight, the colored lights on the Empire State Building winked off. There was a nattering sound at our backs, from Staten Island—a string of firecrackers—followed by a boom: somebody must have lit an M-80. Then we heard delighted screams behind us, and somebody banging on a pot. Church bells rang across the island. Somewhere in Brooklyn, a car’s horn got stuck. Then a red carnation blossomed over Brooklyn—fireworks in Prospect Park—and fireworks went off over Manhattan. But the amateurs dominated the evening. We heard firecrackers going off in sheets and waves everywhere in New York. It sounded like automatic-weapon fire, ripping from place to place. We heard a police siren start near the Verrazano Bridge and course through Staten Island, apparently chasing someone. We also heard sirens in Brooklyn—they could have been police cars, ambulances, or fire engines. Precisely at the turn of the year, it seems, a small fraction of the people in New York City commit a crime of violence, get a fire going, or need an ambulance. Then somebody launched a parachute flare over Brooklyn. It hung and burned for half a minute. We heard deep music coming up the throat of the Kill Van Kull: the big container ships in Port Elizabeth were blowing their foghorns, and they sounded like the heavy pipes of a cathedral organ. A Staten Island Rapid Transit train rattled by. There were no passengers in it, but the driver was leaning on the horn. A party on an empty train.

We never did hear the Manhattan sound wave. Maybe the firecrackers drowned it out, or maybe the glass buildings that have grown up in the financial district blocked it, or maybe we weren’t paying enough attention. The family story remains unconfirmed. Yet my father is still certain that he heard Manhattan more than once. “I was overwhelmed by the miraculous phenomenon of that sound coming from so far away, from such a distance,” he said to me on New Year’s morning. “We felt it was a sound of joy, sort of.”

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Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes a blog about books and ideas.